Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Neologisms and Concept Development.


 It's interesting how things sort of align.  I've been thinking a lot about Orwell and his observations on cognition and concept development.  As Orwell noticed, Newspeak was an attempt to selectively de-conceptualise a language, thereby preventing the preventing the formation of ideas which were inimical to the regime. The important point here is that conceptual development is severely constrained by language limitation.

Without an appropriate word for a concept it becomes difficult to communicate the concept accurately, and consequently, difficult to analyse it and cognitively manipulate it appropriately.
For example; the word, proton, is specific for a positively charged particle in an atom's nucleus, as opposed to "that positively charged "thingy" located in the middle of an atom." The cumbersomeness of the second phrase makes thinking about protons difficult and prone to error.  It appears that the ability to name things is a precondition to thinking about them properly.

So it was interesting to see to Vox link to this article by an American Professor who spent actual time living amongst Africans. It's interesting to see just how deficient the Africans are in higher order concepts and terminology. It's also interesting to see how this impacts upon the actual practical functioning in society.  It's a very good article and worth a read. It's especially worth dwelling over his thoughts about dictionaries.

Secondly, interesting story was run on local television (American readers may not be able to access it.) about a hospital ship that travels around Africa performing lifesaving surgery. It was very moving story but what was quite interesting were the candid comments made by Africans during the show. Firstly, they were all grateful for the service, however, it became apparent during the show that the European/whites were definitely considered as the "other". In fact, several times they spoke of the European stock more as if they were aliens than fellow human beings. One fellow, upon seeing the hospital ship for the first time quite candidly mentioned that "we Africans could never build anything like that".*  There was a strong sense of fatalism and lack of personal agency amongst the Africans.

Now, I'm more hopeful than most of the Manosphere with regard to Africa and Africans. Personally, I think there is a lot of low hanging fruit there that could easily utilised improve the material quality of African life with minimal effort. IQ is important, but so is morality.  But what's really interesting to see is just how miserable life is, and just how depended men become, where they are stripped, haven't developed or are incapable of higher cognitive thought. Orwell's dumbing down is truly terrifying.

Now, some may argue that the concepts need to be there before they can be named and that Africans lack the ability for concept generation ( I dispute this--with qualifications) but what's important to recognise is that higher order thought appears to be impossible without higher order concept generation and analysis, something that is facilitated by the development of a neologism for the concept.

Which leads me to Conservatism.  As I've said before on this blog, the story of Conservatism in the 20th Century is one of continual defeat. Defeat by an enemy that has out thought and maneuvered it. Part of the reason, I believe, is that conservatism has been brain dead for the past two hundred years or so. Even concepts like doublethink and prolefeed came from an author whose intellectual heritage was from the Left.

That's why I think it's important for conservatives to coin neologisms (where appropriate) in order to both describe observed phenomenon and to be able to develop the concept.

For example, take the current observation that most people tend to congregate amongst others of their own race. The standard left take on this is that it is a manifest example of racism (thereby, through frame-shifting,  justifying their social engineering projects). Is there another more accurate word for the phenomenon?  Well, yes there is, homophily, the empirically observed tendency for people to associate with like. The Right is never going to win a battle (nor it should) based upon a justification for racism, but it may win adherents by arguing a case for a society based upon homophily.  Stable societies are built on an accurate understanding of human nature, not a denial of it.

The point is that the Right shouldn't be afraid of coining new words to describe new concepts. Roissy's contribution has been particularly invaluable. The hamster, hypergamy and carousel get an idea across more efficiently than their non-neologisic equivalents. As far as I'm aware, the concept of an  "alpha-widow" has no equivalent in the academic press. Consequently, there has been greater development of the ideas of intersexual and socio-sexual dynamics in blogspace than there has been amongst the "formal" academic conservatives. I'm not being hyperbolic here but the ideas have developed to the point where these ideas, if taken up, are a serious threat to feminism.  It's the first serious pushback.


*The Japs thought exactly the same thing till this bloke came along.

6 comments:

Johnny Caustic said...

I agree with you that new neologisms are absolutely necessary to opposing liberalism. I also agree with a commenter on one of your previous posts that Orwell's coinages draw power from their Anglo-Saxon directness, and your Greek-Latinate suggestions have little chance of success. I think "hypergamy" has a chance of going mainstream, but not many words in that vein are going to succeed. (BTW, "hypergamy" is not Roissy's invention, though he did plenty to popularize it. You'll find lots of it in the pre-Roissy sociology literature; for an excellent example, I highly recommend John Townsend's "What Women Want--What Men Want: Why the Sexes Still See Love and Commitment So Differently", Oxford University Press, 1998.)

"Alpha widows" (is that Rollo's invention?), "sexual market value", Vox Day's "sociosexual hierarchy", and Roissy's "riding the cock carousel" and "rationalization hamster" are brilliant in part because of the imagery they evoke. In that sense, they even out-Orwell Orwell. "Alpha" and "omega" are obviously useful, and I've become fond of "gamma" because it's associated with an odd complex of personality traits found in a substantial number of feminized men who think in female ways and deal with gazing up the social hierarchy by deluding themselves they're looking down. "Beta" is very problematic because sometimes it refers to provider traits, and sometimes it refers to loser traits, and the two get conflated.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the neologisms you suggested in a previous post.

"Genopolitics. The influence of genetics on political orientation." This one seems good to me. It is useful to promote the idea that different races are inherently different, and that most races are by nature collectivist or tribal and strongly opposed to early American values like individualism and liberty. However, it is more powerful to have words for specific political orientations that are correlated with genes, to make people aware of those associations. For example, few people are aware that a race's liking for socialism is related to a race's long-term inbreeding (yielding tribalism) or outbreeding (yielding individualism), so we need words that encapsulate that idea; something like TRIBESELFISH.

"Stenognosis: The state of being a specialist in one are of knowledge only...the opposite of being a polymath...Proles in everything but their specialty." Clearly, "stenognosis" will never catch on. Somebody else suggested "MONOMATH", and I'm gonna go with that. But I'm more fond of the rising term "CLEVER SILLIES", which has a similar but not identical meaning...it refers to people whose facility with abstract thought is so great that they don't notice that their elaborate ideologies about the world are utterly in conflict with concrete reality. Which I think is the really important concept here, moreso than monomathism. It gets to the heart of why so many intellectuals have insane ideas about the world.

[continued...]

Johnny Caustic said...

"Stenosophism: The human tendency to appreciate the proximate, concrete and immediate to the distant, abstract and temporally separated. It's the here and nowism of the average human mind." I prefer your second suggestion, NOWISM. (C.f. the good professor's article about African language and thought.)

"Autognosis: Instinctive "thought". Proportionality generated by gut feeling. The proposition, for instance, that health care should be free automatically produces a sense of approval in most people. Its other name is feel-good politics." I propose FEELGOODISM. Orwellian-sounding, no? But feelgoodism is merely a pointer to another concept, political beliefs that self-pleasure their holders with an addictive feeling of moral superiority. For that, I propose MORALBETTERISM. Once enough people are competing avidly enough to be the MORALBETTERS, each trying to move further to the self-righteous left than the others, you end with an orgy of mass violence that Jim Donald calls a LEFT SINGULARITY.

"Biological vote: The voting patterns that are a consequence of genopolitics and autognosis." No. "Genopolitics" suffices to cover this too.

"Dysrationalia: The capacity to be stupid despite more than adequate IQ." Just call it CLEVER SILLINESS.

"Pseudorationality: The appearance of rationality despite any rational thought." Just call it INTELLECTUAL POSING. (The noun form, INTELLECTUAL POSERS, is stronger.)

"Rationalist fallacy: The belief that because people are rational in some things they are rational in all things. Being stenosophistic, people are usually rational when discussion simple, local and obvious concepts but become progressively less rational as the subject matter drifts outside their circle of competence." This is not a useful neologism. What you need are neologisms for *specific* deficits of rationality, like the ones the good professor notes about Africans, so the words themselves can serve to popularize those exact concepts. Thus, NOWISM for the lack of long-term orientation in Africans (and whites under 10 years) and their inability to understand the necessity of maintenance necessary for an advanced civilization. DISOBLIGATION and DISGRATITUDE for their inability to understand the concepts of "promise" and "gratitude". OUTERMORALITY for the fact that their morality is enforced by policing; they do not internalize much morality. And the usual CARGO CULTISM for their inability to distinguish superficial markers of advanced civilizations from what's actually necessary to run them.

"Koreogamy: What men desire in women." This is already known as "HOTNESS".

I'm not saying my suggestions here are ideal. Ideally, I'd be brilliant enough to come up with neologisms as catchy as "riding the cock carousel". But still, I think suggestions like the ones I've quoted here have much better odds of survival than the archaic-sounding terms you suggested.

Mark Richardson said...
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Mark Richardson said...

The term "alpha widow" is excellent. I hadn't heard it before I read this post, but it so accurately describes some of the women I know.

I was speaking to a colleague just this week. She's in her early 50s but still mourns a fling she had with a much older professor when she was in her early 20s. It has clearly ruined her for other men, despite the fact the professor unceremoniously ditched her for someone else.

Being able to name things does confer some power in politics.

The Social Pathologist said...
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The Civilizationalist said...

OT,

This is my post dealing with free will, God and consciousness that you may find interesting.

http://humancivilizations.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/higher-order-animals-have-been-naturally-selected-to-possess-free-will-enabled-mind-constructs/